Monday, July 13, 2009

Earlier today I was reading an article in Meat Paper that made reference to the factory farming objective of breeding pigs to be more lean than fat (boo! but that's not what this post is about). It seems that early on in the process scientists had achieved the goal of creating a rapid growing, muscular pig that made farmers and agribiz tons of money, but there was one problem. The pigs were randomly dropping dead. Rather than recognizing the omen, they pressed on to try and figure out what might be causing these spot occurrences of porcine demise. It turns out that stress was the culprit. An outwardly invisible genetic trait that is commonly associated with leanness was making the pigs so highly susceptible to stress that the slightest noise - a stiff wind, backfiring tractor, errant oink, or frolicking siblings in the hayloft above - would send the herd into a contagious panic that would leave some short of breath and, well....dead. This delightfully macabre image got me to thinking...

The restaurant is a fast paced and stressful environment. It's been clear to me for some time that success of an individual lies not as much with intelligence and physical prowess as it does with the ability to cope with pressure. In other words, some of the finest cooks, servers and bartenders I've known have only one thing in common: they are cool under pressure. In his book, Blink, MalchomGladwell writes about how our heart rate spikes when we are under pressure and that there is a range of beats per minute where our performance of the act at hand improves greatly. Sharper focus, prioritising movement, split second decisions and the like. Beyond that peak range we begin to break down. Things go out of focus, our movements become clumsy, and little makes sense. While reading that I remembered images of cooks looking from a rail stuffed with tickets to me and saying, "I don't know where the hell we are anymore!?" And yes...I humbly remember myself being in that situation many times before. In fact, the first kitchen job I ever had was an over-taxed pantry station in a very busy restaurant. I worked with this guy Pablo, who told me in my first week there, "just don't get angry while you're working. If you get angry, it's all over." That moment still ranks as one of the most memorable and certainly one of the most important lessons I've learned during my career. Over time and with much practice, I believe it's possible to train one's self to operate in the range of improved performance. Much like the spontaneously dying pigs, we can selectively eliminate our propensity for falling to pieces and move towards a state of mind that stays together most of the time, no matter how badly rattled it gets. More to the point, though is that stress is contagious. In making the transition from cook to chef I realized that how I act in the kitchen when we are busy is central to how everyone else performs, and in a restaurant so small, the entire house is affected one way or the other. There is no cook bad-ass enough to save a chef who spins in circles when the tickets start to dangle from the printer. The frazzled state of mind one person is in while busy can easily drag others along with it. That being said, I think the opposite is true. Calmness and focus can trickle down to the people around you and make even the busiest service seem like that well oiled machine we always hear about. Sure, it sounds a little new-agey, but I've found that staying calm and collected has gotten me out of more tight spots than I care to remember being in. These days, when I feel myself getting close to imploding on the line it's always the result of being overcome by stress, not because it's "too busy," or someone else fucked up the seating. I feel more confident now than I did in the past and it's easier now to pull myself back into focus. Those are the moments when life in the dish pit seems pretty attractive to me. It is the one place where I have come close to mastering the zen-like concentration I'm trying to describe above. Luckily, I get to spend time there regularly these days...